Instructional Design Question -- Creating Impactful ILT Out of Overloaded PowerPoint Presentations

Nov 02, 2018

It's probably a basic instructional design question, but it's got me stumped for ideas.

An SME gave me an info dump of 3 PowerPoint presentations packed full of information regarding a topic within the insurance industry. I need to take these materials and convert them into ILT that is instructionally sound, impactful, and most of all, not overwhelming to the learner. Literally, each bullet point in these presentations if a paragraph long.

Aside from mining each paragraph for its nugget of information, I'm struggling with how to pull this off. Our learners need to remember what they've learned, need to be able to digest it and comprehend it, and I don't simply want to convert a PowerPoint into a Word doc.

I'm a curriculum developer so my job is to create curricula that consists of multiple courses, with each course consisting of multiple unit files. So I'm thinking of multiple smaller courses, lots of activities, and several assessments sprinkled throughout the curriculum.

Anyone have this type of experience where an SME overloads you with "crucial" information that is simply too overwhelming? How did you handle it?

Thank you very much in advance.

Keith

6 Replies

Allison LaMotte
Staff

over 5 years ago11/05/18 at 1:35 pm (UTC)

Hi Keith!

Your idea to chunk the information into several, smaller courses sounds great to me! I also think that it's likely that not all of this information is essential. Here's an article about separating the need-to-know from the nice-to-know that may be helpful to you. I also think you may benefit from reading this article on what to do when you have too much content.

I hope that helps! :)

David Tait
Hero

over 5 years ago11/05/18 at 2:07 pm (UTC)

I'd start by finding out what the learning objectives are, and asking what does the learner need to take away from the course.

Then you can rationailse the content and only include anything that is essential to helping the learner reach their goals.

Ray Cole

over 5 years ago11/06/18 at 12:12 am (UTC)

Look through your SME's PowerPoints with this question in mind: "What is the learner expected to do with this information?" If you can figure that out, it leads straight-away to class activities in which the learner has to do those things.

If you can't figure it out just from reading the PowerPoints (and in most cases, you won't be able to unless you have experience performing the same job as your learners), you will have to go back to your SME. Ask the SME to prioritize if necessary to reduce the amount of content, and then for the must-have content, prompt your SME with the question, "So, learners need to know XYZ in order to be able to...what?" Get the SME to give you examples of how this information will inform learners' decisions or actions in their jobs.

Once you have that, create case studies or scenarios in which learners are put in realistic job situations where they have to use this information to solve real-world job challenges. Do this a lot. Most of the course should be students putting this information into practice to help them make good decisions and take good actions related to their jobs. You may need to create some job aids to help them, in which case they should use those job aids to help them solve the in-class challenges so they will be comfortable using the job-aids after the class when they face similar challenges on their jobs.

By the end of the course, they should have a pretty good idea of what they are expected to do with all this information, and a high degree of confidence that they can use it properly, since they just spent most of the class doing just that.

Good luck with the project! Sounds fun.